Tuesday, February 28, 2012

Status report: Maia, Month 10

Miss Maia is right on that edge of becoming more than a baby. Sigh. Oh, she's doing her baby thing, but with style now. If she wants down, she pushes hard. If she wants up, she reaches eagerly. She yanks her bib off when she's done eating (or at least done tolerating the bib). She picks up paper products to cram in her mouth, but she does it looking at me, saying "See this, Mama? See this?"

She's eating a good variety of real solids now. We had roasted sweet potatoes, carrots, potatoes, and onions the other day and she couldn't get enough. She loves Cheerios and pasta and grapes and noodles and strawberries and beans and bread. She's still okay on the Stage 3s, some, but I could see that ending before long. She fed me a Cheerio yesterday, and seemed taken aback, but pleased, when I got all excited about it.

She's also very good with her sippy--not that we didn't know that, since she's been stealing Chloë's sippies for a while now. She still likes Chloë's better, but she'll drink from her own quite happily. I'm wondering if we should move her straight from R.I.N.D.S. to a sippy at bedtime. We'll see in a couple of months.

She's standing for several seconds at a time now, then squatting and lowering herself to the ground. Sometimes she'll even bounce as she's standing there, like "This is fun! What do you mean, this is world-shattering?" She doesn't bounce in excitement when I come home the way she used to a month ago, but she does reach for me, and invariably gets upset when I put her down shortly afterward to change clothes. If we don't distract her she cries piteously in the mornings when I go, and I usually cave immediately and pick her up for another kiss before passing her off to Eric and making a dash for the door.

Lately she's taken to flopping backwards when she's sitting. She stopped after she did it on the floor a few times and found it unpleasant, but up until then it was on the bed and she'd topple over with abandon. A couple of times she was too close to the edge of the bed and started to slide over, and I stopped her by grabbing her legs, and she giggled. She'll have fun on the roller coasters in a couple of years.

She enjoys books with textures, and turning the pages ("Hey!" Chloë protests when we're all reading together, apparently forgetting the days when Turning Pages Fast was her own favorite occupation). She enjoys honking my nose, or getting me to eat her fist, and loves lunging at me to eat my face so that I'll say "Ew, yucky!" and wipe my nose/chin/cheek/forehead on her belly, making her laugh. And peekaboo remains a great game. She'll play it with any loose fabric lying around, or with my shirt when we're nursing. She tries to do it with her shrug when I'm changing her, but since it's a small tube that doesn't work so well.

She has two teeth now, which we're scrubbing at night with the little fit-over-your-finger brush. Chloë may be a little disappointed we're not using the white toothbrush she picked out for her sister at the dentist, but she reminds us to brush Maia's teeth every day, so it can't be too deep a wound.

Her hair is starting to grow in, though she still doesn't have as much as Chloë did at birth. She took a while to adjust to the new carseat, but now she seems content in it. We went for a short walk this evening (using her snowsuit for I think the second time this winter) and she seemed to enjoy riding around in the big stroller--though she was also sleepy from missing her nap, so that might have been part of it. She responds to "no" now, and may be starting to understand some other things. She's a fun baby, careering towards toddlerdom but not quite there yet--which is just fine by me.